International Journal of Language and Literary Studies

From rote to reflective: Integrating ChatGPT to transform learning outcomes in Cambodian education

Sovanna Huot — 2025-07-02

Cambodia’s education system has long been shaped by rote memorization, hierarchical classroom structures, and examination-focused curricula, practices that often inhibit the development of critical and reflective thinking. This review explores how ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed by OpenAI, can serve as a catalyst for shifting Cambodian learning paradigms from repetition-based instruction to more reflective, student-centred engagement. Drawing on a narrative and thematic integrative review of literature published between 2022 and 2025, the study synthesizes empirical and conceptual findings from global and regional sources, aligned with Cambodian policy frameworks. Key themes include ChatGPT’s impact on conceptual understanding, learner motivation, and metacognitive development. The findings suggest that while ChatGPT can enhance student learning when used for dialogue, clarification, and feedback, its success depends heavily on pedagogical design, teacher facilitation, and ethical integration. Major challenges include infrastructure gaps, digital literacy limitations, linguistic constraints, and cultural norms around teacher authority. The paper concludes with actionable recommendations for policymakers, educators, and researchers, including the development of Khmer-language AI tools, integration of AI literacy into national curricula, and the need for pilot studies and ASEAN-level comparative research. Ultimately, the review affirms that with inclusive planning and sustained investment, ChatGPT can support Cambodia’s transition toward a more reflective, equitable, and future-oriented education system.

The Effectiveness of Using Mobile Phones in Developing English Writing Skills by Yemeni EFL University Students

Naziha Alsoofi — 2025-07-02

This research aimed to investigate the effectiveness of using mobile phones in developing English writing skills by Yemeni EFL university students. The researcher employed a quasi-experimental method. The sample of this study was 50 EFL students who were selected from level two at the Department of English, Faculty of Education, Sana'a University during the academic year 2023-2024. The sample was divided into two groups. The control group consisted of (25) students taught by the traditional way while the experimental group consisted of (25) students taught through using mobile phones (Google Classroom App). The data were collected through a writing test whose results showed a large effect for using the mobile phones to improve the students' writing skills. The results of this study showed that there were statistically significant differences at the 0.05 level between the mean scores in the pre-test and post-test of the experimental group in favor of the post test. In addition, the results showed that there were statistically significant differences at the 0.05 level between the mean scores in the post-test of the experimental group taught the writing skills using mobile phones and the control one taught the writing skills by the traditional method in favor of the experimental group. It can be concluded that the students of the experimental group got significant effect and improvement in the writing skills after using mobile phones. The current study ends with some educational implications, recommendations and suggestions for future research studies.

Digital Politeness: A Gendered Analysis of Complimenting Behaviour on Social Media

Abdelfattah Laabidi — 2025-07-02

With the rapid advancement of technology and the excessive use of social media as platforms for communication, the shades of digital politeness and complimenting speech acts have become a worthy study area. This paper examines the overlap between digital communication, gender, and complimenting behaviour in online communication. It mainly sheds light on how men and women differ in using, reacting and interpreting compliments in online interactions. The current study adopts a quantitative approach by mixing descriptive and inferential statistics. Data are collected using a discourse completion test that comprises seven distinctive scenarios with different power, distance and ranking position relationships. The participants are 62 students from ENS, Moulay Ismail University. After running a Pearson Chi-squared test for each scenario in the DCT, the findings reveal a strong correlation between gender and the choice of complimenting strategies, claiming that gender is an impactful variable affecting compliments' making and interpretation in online contexts. It also concluded that the differences between male and female language users lie in the excessive use of additional cues by female speakers to express emotions, like emojis, liking, tagging and sharing. This study can eventually deepen and enhance the debate on politeness in online dyads by highlighting the intricacies of gendered compliments speech acts. It affords a foundation for further research into pragmatic competence in online contexts.

Teaching Beyond Tradition: Building Teacher Agency in Multilingual EFL Classrooms

Lok Raj Regmi — 2025-07-02

This paper focuses teacher agency for multilingual pedagogy. Drawing on lived experiences of two community school teachers, we discuss how teachers, going beyond the tradition, build teacher agency in multilingual EFL classrooms to address the needs of the students and necessity of the classroom environment. The findings of the study reveal that teachers negotiate with English only policy in a unique way integrating multilingual realities of the classroom. By using learners’ home language in classrooms, the teachers address various classroom challenges such as incomprehensibility of content in English only class, students’ feeling of exclusion, and so on; and ensure the right of the students for education. The findings also reveal that teachers practice various multilingual activities (such as code switching, translation and so on) in English classrooms. The findings, further, show that teachers practice such activities by utilizing their own personal and professional biographies.

Discursive Agency and Literary Visibility: Deconstructing Patriarchal Oppression and Re-narrating Female Subjectivity in Wafa Faith Hallam’s The Road from Morocco (2012)

Abdelhafid Tahboun — 2025-07-02

Over centuries, mutely inhibited Moroccan women have been held captives of two oppressive yet mutually collusive narratives: one is religiously conservative and locally patriarchal, the other is hegemonically Eurocentric. Through delving into the feasible prospects of discursive agency and literary visibility, this paper explores the theme of deconstructing patriarchal oppression and re-narrating female subjectivity in Wafa Faith Hallam’s The Road from Morocco (2012). To trace the liberating potential of writing and probe its rewards of cultural activism and social emancipation, particular focus is put on the unruly contumacy evinced by Saadia, Wafa’s mother. This interpretive study re-examines how literary writing is reconfigured as a politically subversive practice of epistemological disobedience aimed to unsettle the patriarchal logic. To demonstrate the transformative power of literary writing as a sign of spectacular resistance, this reading invokes intersectionality theory and postcolonial feminism as profound theoretical and conceptual lenses. The paper concludes that Moroccan women’s literature often culminate in paradigm-shifting rearrangements in the cultural politics of male/female power imbalances. Hence, the symbolic power of Moroccan women’s writings resides not only in challenging national patriarchal orders and Orientalist circulations but also in transforming the gender-exclusive model of his-story to the gender-inclusive perspective of her-story.

EFL Teachers' Culture, Teaching Perspectives and Practices

Hassan Zaid — 2025-07-02

This study explores Moroccan English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' perceptions and practices related to teaching culture. A quantitative survey design was used to gather data from 60 EFL teachers. Descriptive statistics were used to explore teachers’ culture teaching perceptions and instructional practices in classes. First, the results reveal that most teachers acknowledge the importance of incorporating culture into language teaching, perceiving it as both a fundamental aspect of language teaching and crucial for reinforcing students' cultural identities. Teachers also expressed favorable views towards intercultural education, considering it important to foster tolerance. However, opinions vary on whether students need advanced language proficiency before engaging in cultural learning. Second, Teachers use a variety of cultural activities, including dialogues, role-plays, cultural comparisons, and authentic materials to teach culture in their classrooms. However, certain activities, such as cultural research projects, and personal cultural narratives are less frequently used. Finally, the pedagogical implications highlight the need for a principled approach that bridges the gap between being aware of the prominence of cultural integration and effectively implementing it in EFL classrooms to cultivate critical intercultural communicative competence to avoid idealization of the target culture and preserve local cultures.

The Impact of the Flipped Classroom Strategy on Secondary School Students’ Achievement in English Language Skills in Hajjah Province

Naseem Ali Ahmed Qaid Alqua’fi — 2025-07-02

The present study aimed to investigate the impact of the flipped classroom strategy on secondary school students’achievement in English language skills in Hajjah province. This study employed a quasi-experimental approach to achieve the objectives of the study and have a deep insight regarding the study investigation. The sample of the study consisted of fifty tenth-level students who were studying English course for Yemen(textbook N.4) at Alzahra’a secondary school for girls in Hajjah province during the academic year 2023- 2024. They were divided purposefully into two groups experimental (n=25) and control (n=25).The researchers used a pre/post-achievement test which consisted of five questions to measure the level of students before and after achieving the experiment (teaching the experimental group through the flipped classroom strategy and teaching the control group through traditional methods). The results of the present study showed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in all five English language skills. The over all effect size of the pre/post achievement test of the experimental group moderate to large (?²=0.41), indicating that the flipped classroom strategy had a meaningful impact on improving students’English language skills. Domain-specific effect sizes of the two groups (experimental and control) in the post achievement test reached as high as ?²=0.64, suggesting the flipped classroom strategy as an effective alternative to traditional methode in English language learning. These findings suggest that integrating flipped classroom strategy in EFL classrooms can enhance students’academic outcomes. This study recommended the wider adoption of the flipped classroom strategy in Yemeni secondary schools to improve English language learning and call for further studies in other English language parts.

The Importance of Teaching Intercultural Empathy in Moroccan High Schools

Abdelhak Elbouziany — 2025-07-02

With the rise of globalisation and global interconnectivity, intercultural communication in education has become a subject of extensive study and discussion. Clearly, when we discuss a mode of communication, we discuss a variety of competencies, skills, and abilities, such as empathy and specifically intercultural empathy. Thus, this article aims to examine intercultural empathy and its impact on high school students. Furthermore, we explain why a high school teacher-student relationship is necessary for such an impactful value. For this reason, an online survey questionnaire as well as interviews were employed as data collection instruments. A total of 233 teachers from different regions in Morocco took part in this research. This survey used Statistical Package of Social Sciences software to analyse the collected data and draw back the curtain on the impact of intercultural empathy on Moroccan high school students. Findings revealed that intercultural empathy is a vital component of effective language acquisition, and in order to comprehend a language, it is imperative to have a comprehensive understanding of its corresponding culture. The obtained findings can be of paramount importance for tutors and decision makers regarding the implementation of intercultural empathy in the teaching process.

The Use of Intertextuality and Allusion: A Transgeneric Study of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Chawqi’s Masraaou Cleopatra

Maroua Touil — 2025-07-02

A literary work embodies the traces of other works. It may preserve the characteristics of precedent works or bring forth new images. Many works may converge into the same subject but speak about it differently, each from its ideological, historical and cultural point of view. T.S. Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent affirms writers need not write in their ancestor’s skin and be only influenced but also create and add. Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra and Chawqi’s Masraaou Cleopatra display a lot of convergences but also diverge mainly in the representation of Antony and the description of the Actium Battle. Shakespeare’s depiction of Antony is more detailed while Chawqi’s concern is directed toward Cleopatra. Also, Shakespeare describes the Actium Battle not as a political struggle but as a conflict between two cultures. Jacques Derrida in The Law of Genre defines genre as “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy” (3). Derrida celebrates ‘dissemination’ which conveys the multiplicity of genre. The notion of ‘impurity’ reveals an intertextual play of texts, a ‘permutation’ of texts. In “The Bounded Text” Julia Kristeva views text “a permutation of texts, an intertextuality in the space of a given text” in which “several utterances taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another” (56). Gerard Genette beholds literary works as ‘articulations.’ “In Structuralism and Literary Criticism” he states that literary critic “creates a structure out of a previous structure by rearranging elements which are already arranged within the objects of his or her study”(83). Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is definitely a tragedy from a generic point of view, but strokes of epic are embedded within tragedy. This is an evidence of Derrida’s ‘anomaly’ or ‘contamination’ and a justification of genre instability and multiplicity. Intertextuality is not only depicted through Shakespeare’s influence by Plutarch but also through Chawqi’s attempt to fill the gaps of Shakespeare’s representation. Chawqi rewrites the story of Antony and Cleopatra emphasizing the epic aspect more than the tragic. There is a crossing of boundaries in both plays. Through this presentation, I intend to show that the two plays combine multiple genres such as the tragic and the epic, and highlight the use of intertextuality and allusion

Focus on Form Instruction and Development of Accuracy in Specific Language Structures

Paulyn Datu — 2025-07-02

The study sought to develop accuracy among high school students in specific English grammatical structures through focus on form (FonF) instruction integrating the techniques of input enhancement, input processing and task essential language. The study used a counterbalanced design in which two (2) pre-sectioned classes were both exposed to different treatments, taking turns as the focus on form (FonF) and the whole language (WL) groups. The instruments used to gather data were teacher-made grammar tests and students’ essays. The frequency of use and the errors on usage over the number of clauses were analyzed as evidence of accuracy in specific language structures. The findings showed that there was a significant increase in the frequency of use of the structures in the FonF groups’ essays by around 19.46% on the average. While, the FonF group made more errors in the use of the structures, this is attributed to their higher frequency of use of the forms compared to the WL group. There is also no significant difference seen in the count of usage errors between the groups’ tests and essays suggesting that FonF instruction was more effective in fostering grammatical accuracy and fluency through increased application of targeted structures in writing.